Friday, September 18, 2009

We are excited to be releasing new features -- features that have been prioritized based on feedback from you.

Event Tracking

Get Excited! Event Tracking, our number-one feature request, is available through the API. You can use event tracking to measure the number of user interactions with a website. For example, you can track:

the total number of times a white paper is downloaded

the length of time it takes to load a video

the number of validation errors users get when filling out a form

If you already have an integration with Google Analytics, Event Tracking is even more exciting. To illustrate, let's look at Sprout. Sprout's integration with Google Analytics helps customers track user interaction within their Sprout content. However, users currently must log into the Sprout interface to see billing and account management data, and then also log into Google Analytics to see how their own sprouts are performing. Now that event tracking is available through the API, companies like Sprout can pull the interaction metrics tracked by Google Analytics events and present them directly in clients' performance dashboards--effectively leveraging Google Analytics as a platform to power their analysis reports.

The Google Analytics web interface provides a navigation report. Analysts use it to infer which links visitors click on, from one particular page to the next. Now that this data is available through the API, you can create new visualizations, such as custom site overlays, to see which links get the most clicks.

Increased filter length

The length of filter expressions has been increased to 128 characters. This enables developers to perform more complex queries with fewer requests to the API, saving bandwidth and quota.

There is a detailed list of all these changes in our public change log. We hope you find these features useful to your development and look forward to your comments and continued feedback. If you haven't done so already, please join our public Google group and let us know how you've been using the API.